Jambo does not mean hello – my first week in Dar es Salaam

My childhood was filled with educational television programming.  Not only was my access to the TV limited, I had to learn something.  Fortunately, shows like Reading Rainbow made the combination of learning and TV fun.  For the last twenty years I have carried around the following sentence from Levar Barton’s trip to Kenya: “Jambo means hello”.  Finally making my way to East Africa, I eagerly awaited my first opportunity to utter these words.  But then a curious thing happened: no one said ‘jambo’ to me.  Confused, I referred to my pocket Swahili handbook that essentially said the following: ‘jambo means “hello, I am a (stupid) Muzungu (white/foreigner), please speak English to me”’.  Good thing I was too timid to bust out the jambo without hearing it first! To be fair to Levar, maybe I can use jambo in Kenya (I’ll let you know) and here people say ‘mambo’, which isn’t actually that far off….

Anyway, It’s my 7^th day here and I’ve taken myself to brunch at a popular ex-pat café, Epidor.  It’s a welcome reprieve from the stifling heat of my guestroom and the ant invasion I discovered just as I was leaving!  I figure its best to use this entry to update you on what I’ve seen/been doing this past week.

The magic of air travel

Recently I’ve sent a lot of time on planes and in airports.  Unfortunately for a person as chatty as me, much of this time has been spent alone.  I say unfortunately because when you are an economy class plebe like me, air travel can be filled with mysterious and frustrating happenings that just beg to be discussed. 

Right now I’m writing from the cabin on KLM flight 0571 where we are waiting on the tarmac in Kilimanjaro for an hour before continuing on to Dar es Salaam.  Luckily between my laptop, kindle, i pod and the cake I saved from our mid-flight snack, I have a lot of entertainment options.

Indulging in my lawyerly love of the list format here go my air travel musings:

Pearson Terminal 1

•  KLM and Air France might have one of the most confusing check-in procedures I’ve witnessed and frankly, that’s saying a lot.  You arrive upon a mass of people converging upon one another at the end of terminal one, all carting their international-two-suitcase-plus-maximum-limit-of-allowable-carry-on-luggage.  Soon you realize that the only clear line-up (or to be technical, non-line up, because no one is in it) is the business/1^st class check-in counter.  The rest of the crowd lumbers around between ambiguous KLM and Air France lines only to find out that they mysteriously have to go to a poorly demarcated computer kiosk to print their boarding passes and then join huge poorly identified lines to check in their bags with employees who check your passport and visas and seem fully capable of also printing boarding passes.  Maybe it’s my inner Luddite acting out, but isn’t the point of replacing people with machines to replace the people?!?

• If you are lucky, you wont find out that the line you joined is actually the one for the security check-in, not the airline check-in… seriously, you have to see this chaos to believe it! The length of the security line increases the blood pressure of the people who like me are waiting in the obscenely long baggage check lines while watching the clock march steadily towards boarding time.  At Pearson the illusion of a long security line is created by the deep attachment Torontonians evidently have for one another.  It is barely an exaggeration to say that a third of the people in the security check line aren’t even traveling.  That’s in addition to the people lining the edges of the security line area!!!

Duty Free

•  Who doesn’t love tax-free luxury items? Indulging myself, I bought a bar of Clinique soap from the Duty Free immediately past the security check. I showed my boarding pass, handed the cashier my credit card, paid and then expected to get my soap. No dice.  I asked ‘Will it be delivered at my gate?’ (I don’t understand the reasons for this procedure either, but I’ve seen it before) to which she responded, ‘No, you have to pick it up at the Duty Free closer to your gate’.  That’s right, so then I walked 5 minutes to that Duty Free and waited 10 minutes next to a makeshift clothes rack beside the cashiers for a dude driving one of those airport golf cars to drive my soap down to me.  Seriously? Feel free to help me out on the logic of this!